I wonder how many Herald readers realise how all-embracing, unremitting and determined is the Herald’s pushing of the National party barrow? Perhaps it is so much par for the course that it goes unremarked by many readers.

Today’s issue provides an interesting case study, especially for those (of whatever political persuasion) who might be under the illusion that they are reading an unbiased account of current events.

The lead story is about a request for help made by a “National” MP to Eion Musk in respect of restoring international communications to Tonga following the eruption – note the care taken in the headline to specify a “National” MP – not just any old MP then.

That is followed up by a column from Claire Trevett, headlined that 2022 will be a “year of reckoning” for “Ardern”. The piece then, foreseeably enough, ignores the actual polling evidence by asserting that “Christopher Luxon’s” accession to the National leadership will make life difficult for “Ardern”, conveniently overlooking the actual evidence that the minor lift following Judith Collins’ dismissal has not been followed up by a curiously inactive Luxon; indeed, the recent Curia/Taxpayers Union poll showing Labour and the PM gaining ground is dismissed as irrelevant on grounds that are unspecified.

There is then a standard-issue piece from former National grandee, Steven Joyce, warning about forthcoming “storms” to follow today’s economic “sunshine”, and Fran O’Sullivan then weighs in with “five things the government needs to do”. Siouxsie Wiles, one of our (and the government’s) most trusted expert advisers, is then reported as warning that the red light setting will not be enough to stop new transmissions.

A different warning, from the Herald itself, is then reported and headlined to the effect that NZ is “on the brink” of a “major border failure” as the outbreak looms.

These warnings are set alongside warm and approving interviews with a new National MP (Joseph Mooney) about his first days in parliament, and with a retired National MP (Nikki Kaye) about how happy she is – with (of course) frequent references to her links with Sir John Key.

All of this, of course, is calculated to produce a warm glow of satisfaction and encouragement to National-supporting readers, and to create an impression that things are bound to get worse for a Labour government that is losing support. It must take a great deal of care and effort to produce an issue that paints such a distorted picture.

Help! Mercy! I had thought (or hoped) that, as we turned into the New Year, the Herald would give us a break or put another record on. But, presumably because they have nothing new to say, the Herald has begun 2022 by re-publishing the columns written last year by their reliably anti-government columnists. As the French say “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.”

And, if the supply of these golden oldies runs out, they can always turn to some publicity-hungry, so-called “socialite” to regale us with her “expert” opinion on constitutional matters. Anything, it seems, is worth publishing, as long as it takes a pot-shot at the government.

We surely have a right to expect something better from our supposedly leading daily newspaper?

Richard Prebble in today’s Herald rehearses his familiar charge sheet under the guise of trying to find something to commend in the government’s handling of the pandemic.

What he, and other critics, fail to recognise is that the coronavirus pandemic provides a series of manifold and varied challenges that – typically – offer a series of choices between two alternatives. Should the government help hard-pressed businesses with financial assistance and accept the risk of higher inflation? Or should they tell business-owners that they are on their own because the government can’t find the money to help them? Is lockdown the answer to the spread of the virus or should we take our chances on vaccination to stop the spread?

It is in the nature of things that, whatever answer the government gives to these conundrums, the way is open for critics to lambast them for the downside that inevitably attends whatever choice they make. How easy it must be to sit on the sidelines and intervene with a stinging criticism of a decision which is, in the end, inevitably a choice between two unattractive alternatives offered by a once-in-a-generation crisis!

And there is a further puzzle in the Prebble analysis. If the government has made so many mis-steps, how is it that our rates of infections, hospitalisations and deaths are so much better than those of other countries, and why is our mid-pandemic economy doing so much better than those elsewhere?

The government must have been making quite a few good decisions and doing a lot of things right. It would be good if this could occasionally be recognised.

Mike Hosking in today’s Herald treats us to yet another re-run of his familiar anti-government bile and vitriol. No surprise there, you may say, but we may nevertheless marvel that his rant is unsupported by any evidence. The evidence, if he were to care to consult it, shows conclusively that our government has produced a response to the pandemic that is the envy of the rest of the world.

There is not a sniff of a recognition in the Hosking diatribe that we have achieved levels of infections, hospitalisations, and deaths that are – on a per-population basis – better than those of any other country, and that our economy is in a remarkably strong and buoyant state. Our government must have done something right – and that is the message shown by the polls – and particularly by the most important poll of all, the vaccination totals.

Even Hosking’s “politician of the year” has lost his gloss. Freed from any responsibility to actually do anything other than criticise, David Seymour has now been relegated to his true status as irritant and gadfly – able to pick and choose when and on what issue to snipe on the sidelines, but never called to account for any actual consequences of the advice he so readily offers.

Times must be tough for the Herald, Hosking and Seymour when they can offer nothing more than running around on their tired old treadmill. The real world must be for them such an annoying place!

When the Herald has exhausted even its ample resources of in-house journalists and columnists who can be relied on to represent the National party interest, it is seemingly able to call on a selection of guest contributors to carry the banner.

The latest of these appears in today’s edition. As with all his predecessors, Andrew Barnes is described as a “businessman” which is offered as an apparently all-purpose qualification to comment on whatever aspect of government policy attracts his attention. The Herald no doubt sees a pleasing opportunity, given that the new leader of the National party is or was a businessman, to try to point up a correlation of some sort between business experience and political expertise.

Readers of the Herald, however, might well plead “Give us a break!’